As a novelist, I often feel pressure to act as if my work is completely detached from financial considerations. When an interviewer asks, “What made you write this book?” they don’t want to be told that writing books is literally my job, or that I have bills to pay, or to be treated to an explanation of the role of labor under capitalism. So like most writers, whether they write poetry or self-help, I generally try to fulfill expectations by talking as if I spend my days eating lotuses and weaving dreams, too filled with artistic inspiration to care about money.

I really would love not to care about money, and I’m a very impractical person, so I have huge potential in this area. But I’m always really poor, so I can’t get started. I care or starve. That doesn’t mean my novels aren’t inspired by ideas and feelings and experiences, but I also have to write something that sells.

I’ve often found that pressure helpful. I suffered for years from writer’s block, but there’s no cure for being blocked like being a month behind on rent when your only marketable skill is writing. Writing for a living can also help cure you of preciousness, of your idea of yourself as a superior soul. It reminds you that the reader is who it’s all for; that the point is to communicate, not impress. The best work I’ve done has come from a friction between artistic aspirations and worries about the sales department.

But when I really needed a paycheck, I’ve also written a lot of crap.

I’m not calling this material “crap” because it was genre fiction or ad copy. There are people who write these things with integrity and artistry and passion. I mean that I did jobs I didn’t believe in, and I phoned them in. I wrote things as fast as I could type them because I was given an unrealistic deadline. I did jobs so poorly conceived it was impossible to do them well. I wrote reading guides for schools where the template I was required to use was so wrongheaded, I felt complicit in making America stupid. I wrote an introduction to a new edition of the US Constitution although I had no background in either history or constitutional law, and it went out under the name of the real historian who’d written the (unacceptably boring) introduction to the previous edition. The least of my crimes was writing a children’s book about Ancient Greece sourced entirely from Wikipedia—the least because, as the editor told me, all their writers used Wikipedia; that assumption was built into the deadlines. Another time, I wrote two reviews of computer games before I had ever played a computer game, including the ones I reviewed. No ethics in gaming journalism on my watch. In fact, the practice of assigning writing jobs to people with no expertise is common, and feigning expertise is one of the indispensable skills of the hack. One political writer I know told me his foolproof system was to buy a bottle of whisky, stay up all night reading articles on the internet, and write the thing at dawn. Another described their job as being “like meeting someone new, fucking them, getting pregnant and giving birth inside five hours every damn day. Then doing it again the next morning.”

The practice of assigning writing jobs to people with no expertise is common, and feigning expertise is one of the indispensable skills of the hack.

My worst hack job of all time was writing three erotic romances—to give them their polite name, though the ones I wrote were really just porn for women. It was the worst job both because the stuff I wrote was unforgivably bad, and because it was the hardest. Each novel had to be 100,000 words, and I got $5,000 each. My idea was that writing these would buy me time to write my “real” novel, so I gave myself a month for each one, and stuck to that deadline like a person defusing a bomb with a digital clock ticking down beside them. From the moment a porn month began, I porned every hour I was awake.

Before I go on, let me say that I know many people write erotic romance because they love the genre. I have nothing but respect for people who are devoted writers and readers of erotic romance. I deserved the two-star reviews they gave me.

But I’m not one of them. I’m incurably not one of them, in the same way I’m a person who can’t appreciate the charms of eggplant. No amount of money could make me one of them, much less $5,000 for 100,000 words.

But I also have deep respect for writers of erotic fiction because I learned how hard it is. The first sex scene was no problem, but then there was another. And another. Each one had to feel different—but, as the editor had warned, it couldn’t get too edgy. It didn’t have to be all vanilla, there could be chocolate—but not too much chocolate. I soon realized this meant writing the same scene over and over, and trying desperately to make the 17th bowl of vanilla-with-chocolate-sprinkles seem different from the first 16.

Furthermore, as everyone knows, when you’re not in the mood for it, porn is gross. After the first few hours, it was also unendurably boring. Nonetheless it made me horny, in a downtrodden, creepy way. I was disgusted and horny and disgusted by my horniness. I was hornily falling asleep in my chair. I was hornily staring out the window and hornily wondering how I got to this point.

But the real bane of my life was getting the characters undressed. When you’re trying to be sexy, you don’t want to write, “He took off his shoes. Then his socks.” Yet often your characters are wearing shoes and socks. They’re wearing tights and pants and sometimes even coats and gloves—all of which must go before the scene can get going. You don’t want to inadvertently create a mental image of two people fucking in socks and ski hats. So you’re constantly racking your brains for fresh versions of, “In a trice, they were naked,” or, “He undressed her impatiently.” I was singularly bad at this. Again and again, I found myself staring at the lines “She took off her shoes. Then her socks,” with my brain absolutely unresponsive.

All day, as I wrote sex scenes, the three cats and a dog sat in a circle at my feet and stared at me judgmentally.

I took heroic measures to stave off the crippling boredom. I named a well-endowed character “Choo-Choo.” I had the characters have sex on boats, in department stores, in the lion enclosure at the zoo. The first novel was about a university—for sex!—and I incorporated subtle parodies of academic culture into the blow job class. The next novel was about sexy jewel thieves and, for a brief time, I was giddily inspired: I incorporated a fireman’s pole and miniature horses into an orgy scene and it was like being the only person on Neptune singing a beautiful aria into the emptiness of space. But by the time I was writing the last novel (about a tv channel—for sex!) I had lost all capacity for invention. I trudged through the scenes about the sex soap opera and the sex game show spiritlessly, wretchedly, like a donkey turning a mill wheel.

During this period, I went to pet-sit for an acquaintance, also because I needed the money. He had three cats and a dog, and I’ve never encountered pets so needy. At first, it was a constant battle to prevent all three cats from climbing into my lap, while the dog simultaneously nosed in to lick my typing hands. With persistence, I trained them to keep their distance for long enough periods that I could work. This meant that all day, as I wrote sex scenes, the three cats and a dog sat in a circle at my feet and stared at me judgmentally. It was like an allegorical representation of True Art offended by the hack’s betrayal.

*

Of course, I’m not the first “serious” writer who’s gone through this kind of thing. F. Scott Fitzgerald was not only the author of The Great Gatsby, but of the advertising slogan for a local dry cleaner: “We Keep You Clean In Muscatine.” Both Faulkner and Hemingway wrote for the Ford corporate magazine, the Ford Times. Among Martin Amis’s early works is a book of tips for winning Atari 2600 games called The Space Invaders Book, and Neil Gaiman began his career with a biography of Duran Duran.

There have been hacks as long as there have been writers. The 19th-century novel Grub Street is about a miserable hack writer in a world of miserable hack writing; it takes its title from the 18th-century English term for hack writing, which Samuel Johnson defines in his dictionary as: “originally the name of a street … much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean production is called grubstreet.” What Johnson doesn’t mention is that many of the “small histories” of that time were fake. Daniel Defoe’s entire career as a novelist began with books that passed themselves off as the memoirs of pirates, thieves, and castaways. To some degree, this practice is responsible for the invention of realism, as writers like Defoe had to make their accounts sound as credible as possible. The epistolary novel also originated largely with books that were sold as real correspondences, like Letters to a Portuguese Nun. In the early 19th century, it remained common to introduce a novel with a preface explaining how the author had “found these documents”—i.e. the novel itself. By that time, readers weren’t expected to take this literally; it was a spandrel left over from a more credulous age. (Of course hack writers continued to invent genres through the 20th and 21st centuries, from the murder mystery to dinosaur porn.)

Looking back further, it’s hard to beat the shamelessness of the 16th-century author who wrote a fake deathbed confession for the writer Robert Greene and hawked it as a pamphlet. I personally feel a kinship to the writer Thomas Nashe, now best remembered as a collaborator of Shakespeare, because although Nashe was fiercely snobbish and loved to sneer at the mercenary behavior of others, he also wrote porn for cash. His poem, “The Choice of Valentines, or The Merry Ballad of Nashe His Dildo,” explicitly describes the narrator’s sexual misadventures with a woman who, left frustrated by his premature ejaculation, finishes herself off with the eponymous dildo. When upbraided for the filthiness of such works, Nashe excused himself by saying poverty forced him “to pen unedifying toys for gentlemen.”

Like most poems of the time, “The Choice of Valentines” was never published. It was written to attract the financial patronage of a nobleman. For centuries, this was a crucial source of income for writers, and hack writing consisted largely of flattery. All students of classics are familiar with the countless Roman verses written in praise of Maecenas, whose most memorable quality was his willingness to give money to poets. Elizabethan literature has entire genres devoted to flattery, like the “country house” poem, in which the writer thanks a patron for a free vacation by gushing about the accommodations. The first known country house poem, dating from 1613, was written by a woman, Emilia Lanier, who’s primarily known as an early feminist and possible mistress of Shakespeare, but was also a hero of sycophancy; her one book of poetry contains 35 full pages of fawning dedications to no fewer than nine noblewomen.

And as long as I’m outing myself as a hack, it would be remiss of me not to use this opportunity to mention that my latest novel, The Heavens, has Emilia as a major character. After all, what could be more appropriate than revealing that this essay was written to promote something else—my “real” work? But does that make this essay a piece of hack writing? Perhaps it’s cleverly self-referential? Is this a cynical essay or a high-minded ad? Maybe it’s basically a begging letter? Where do we draw these lines? Here I can’t resist quoting a real begging letter from the medieval poet Mathieu de Vendôme to his father because, although it wasn’t intended as literature, it’s a lovely cri de coeur that speaks for poor writers everywhere: “I am in want. I have no books and no clothes. Paris drinks money. What tiger would refuse its kitten?”

The moral of this story is that hack writing isn’t even that well paid. Grub Street wasn’t just known for its shoddy publications, but for its poverty. Today’s hacks could often walk down the street, fill out an application at Duane Reade and make the same money for fewer hours. Yet it’s surprisingly hard to give up. Even when you’re not perpetrating a hoax, it has a sleazy glamour to it. You’re a rogue, a Humphrey Bogart character, a scrappy low-life living by your wits. And finally, it’s still writing. When people ask what you’ve been doing, it still feels good to say, “I’m writing …” even if the end of the sentence makes you blush.

So I want to finish by reminding you of the classic joke about the man who gets a job cleaning up after the elephants at the circus. A friend comes to see him and finds him, shovel in hand, knee-deep in elephant shit. The friend cries out, “You can’t do this job! Come work in my office. You can wear a clean suit! I’ll pay you whatever you’re making here.”

The guy looks up from shoveling shit and says, “What? And give up show business?”

The following interview took place at night, in the back seat of Charles Simic’s Volkswagen on Interstate 5 in Oregon. Mrs. Simic was driving and the Simics’ five year old daughter, Nicki, was asleep in the front seat. Mr. Simic had just finished a reading in a Salem sorority house and was on his way home to Hayward, California, where he had a class to teach the next day. Interviewer Barry Lopez joined Simic in Salem and rode south with him on the Interstate to the T&R Truck Stop, where the interview was concluded over coffee. After the Simics left, the waitress pointed to the tape recorder and asked if Mr. Simic was an important personality. Told he was a poet, she said “We get all types in here.”

Barry Lopez: You are an apolitical poet. In light of that: how do you see your function as a poet in 1972?

Charles Simic: I don’t like the word “function.” It implies choice. I have no choice in the matter. I have ambitions, but no idea to what extent I fulfill them. For example, I can say that my wish is to remind people of their humanity, to preserve the freedom of imagination, of spirit, without which it would be difficult to live.

Each poem is addressed to an ideal reader. You are reaching out to tell someone some­thing you passionately believe in and there is something religious about it, something sacred. In a sense you want to tell the truth. These are all very big words—I think I’m getting away from the question here—but I’m tired of crap, of imprecision, of dehumanization. I want to simplify; I want to return to and communicate some basic hu­man content.

All poets are guardians of the language—Pound said something like that. They keep certain channels of communication open. If there were no poets, how would the unconscious be articulated?

BL: Do you see that as a primary function of poetry?

CS: I think what I’m really asking for in poetry is more life. More life! Heightened consciousness of my own existence and my existence in relation to others.

I feel poetry is, ultimately, optimistic. Despite the fact that I may write a series of very gloomy, dark poems, the gesture itself is a positive one. One celebrates—even living in despair. In some curious way that gesture is anonymous. There’s a level on which we wish to further ourselves, our own egos—but there are moments in which we feel very lucid, simply disarmed, where that gesture is so much greater than our destiny. You realize the greatness of poetry. We make the gesture then in the name of everyone who has ever lived. It is a selfless act.

BL: Do you have a sense as a poet of filling a space in time, that there have been other poets before you and that there will be others after you?

CS: I think I do feel that, but I try to avoid dwelling on it too much. It can become an obsession where the poet feels that he has to make deliberate, chess-like, moves. Still,the source of faith in the continuing possibilities of poetry comes from that long tradition. To read a poet who, let’s say, wrote 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, and to feel how contemporary he still it well, an astonishing experience. The great gesture, the selfless poetic act, is timeless, a moment outside history. With poetry we are still back in the cave, we still understand very little about the universe, we’re wondering, we’re astonished at the stars, everything is new everything is beautiful, complicated, myster­ious.

The poet wishes secretly to be a philosopher—in other words, to understand the universe fully.

BL: Perhaps the freshness of good poetry derives from that timelessness, that sense ever-present.

CS: Yes. The freshness comes because poetry, after all, is an essential human activity, arising out of an equally elemental human con­dition. We still have our bodies to contend with, we still live in the same way, we still get tired, we still eat, screw and puzzle over these things.

The poet wishes secretly to be a philosopher—in other words, to understand the universe fully. But poetry differs from traditional philosophy in that it realizes that ideas have to be tested in daily existence, in simple ordinary human experiences. You sit one evening and string together a series of beautiful statements about life and go to bed kind of sublime, moved. Next morning one wakes up and, usually forgetting all that, goes his very grumpy way through simple daily tasks. Later on in the day, one remembers the ideas he had before and somehow . . . there’s some great gap. We don’t know how to incorporate it into our daily existence.

Let’s put it this way: philosophy is an intellectual activity, poetry an activity of the emotions. The ultimate aim of the emotions is to digest ideas. To take a great idea, a great proposition about the universe and feel what it means in relation to life on earth—well, that’s quite another matter.

Ideas very often try to explain feelings—explain from the outside and they are very arbitrary, they don’t penetrate. We find periods of history where there is a great desire to eliminate feelings from rational discourse, today they are not precise, they cannot exist in our scientific universe. The problem with philosophy is that it generalizes about everything including feelings, but poetry has no choice. It has to particularize. Actually, its magic comes from that faith in the concrete.

It seems to me that if you cut the man in half, if you throw a part of him out the window, pretty soon that other half is going to rebel and assert itself and you are going to have a lot of problems. But I think poetry is aware of that lace of balance and so it searches for the whole man.

BL: Which is why you can for instance consider the positiveness of gloomy poems?

CS: Yes. Poets are very patient. They realize that man is complex and there’s no point in pretending that he isn’t. Philosophers are in a rush. They would like to solve the problem, cut through with a knife. It simply can’t be done.

BL: To change direction a little bit, you were born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, then moved to Chicago when you were eight and then on to New York when you were twenty. What precipitated the move to New York?

CS: I don’t know. It seemed like the thing to do. My father—this is really a trite story—but my father applied to Columbia University back in the 1920s and was accepted, but he never managed to raise the money and come to the States. So I wanted to leave Chicago and I applied for Columbia, and I didn’t get accepted. But I figured I would go to New York anyway. It was very silly. I just wanted to do something different. All my friends kept asking what the hell do you want to go to New York for? And that seemed to be enough reason to go. I also wanted to get away from home. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. That was in 1958.

BL: You’ve been on the road for the past ten days on the Pacific Northwest Poetry Circuit. Did you do any writing on the road?

CS: I was hoping to do some work. I didn’t do any. I’m easily distracted, suffering from amnesia. I can’t remember where I’ve been yesterday or what people I’ve seen. Also I’m insomniac; I don’t sleep well in new places. Tends to create problems.

BL: When you’re working at home do you have any schedule you try to adhere to?

CS: I try to work a little bit every day. I keep a notebook and try to jot down whatever occurs to me during the day. Then if I feel very fresh and lucid I will work a little bit more, depending on how much energy I have available at the time. But I do try to keep a continuity. You need to maintain a certain sensitiveness toward words. And if you don’t do anything for two weeks then you lose it and it takes a long time to get it back. Each day we all have a certain amount of poetry in ourselves. It might be no more than one image or one word. At one time, I didn’t pay much attention to these daily gifts I thought I would remember them. Well, I found out otherwise.

So now if I wake up at 4 am in the morning and something occurs to me, I will leap out of bed and write it down. You never remember it later. It’s too fragile. And very often the next day it doesn’t look like much. It’s hard to return to that same inner place where the thing had its birth. But it’s good to have anyway. It might take a few months and I might come back to it and see it as a seed, a possibility, even a whole poem.

And this is one thing young writers very often don’t understand, that fortunately, we are not poets all the time.

BL: How does the process differ in your eyes from the process of writing fiction?

CS: Fiction seems to have other requirements. With poetry there is no need to sit down every day for so many hours, just to put it all down on paper. Poetry is so concentrated, so elusive. One couldn’t possibly work for eight hours. One has to wait for moments of heightened attention and capture them. On the other hand, there are periods when I’m working for a long time on a poem and I’m very upset by the way it’s going. I will sit for days and spend my entire time revising. But I have to be really deep into the material before that happens. I know the poem is there, but it needs work, something to make it stand up straight.

BL: Do you draw strength from the works of friends, like W.S. Merwin?

CS: I do draw strength. To read a good book of poems by a friend is a great source of energy. You feel, well, here poetry is possible. Optimism enters.

BL: Does teaching help you at all?

CS: Yes. Teaching forces me to formulate ideas about poetry and craft. Not once, but repeatedly, from different angles. It keeps you alert. So far that has been very good.

BL: How do you handle the image of yourself as poet, your sense of duty, with other things that impinge on your life?

CS: Well, like everyone else I wish I had more time. But this is not possible. I’m used to it, being divided, playing the role. I do feel a responsibility to my students. It would be nice to teach them something. I’m never conscious of myself as a poet. First, I’m a poet occasionally, when I’m writing. The rest of the time I’m just anybody, paying bills, eating, arguing with my wife. And this is one thing young writers very often don’t understand, that fortunately, we are not poets all the time.

Solzhenitsyn has a wonderful thing about nationalities. One is not a Russian by being born one. Ultimately, you’ve a responsibility to learn to be a human being. You cannot hide a certain creepiness or selfishness behind being called French or German, American, whatever. In the same way, as a poet, I think you have to understand; you have to learn to be a poet. It’s a very old profession, a very sacred one. It’s not an occupation.

All in all, I would welcome more solitude. I’m happiest when I’m staring at a wall.

BL: Any thoughts on the last ten days you’ve been on the road?

CS: Well I enjoy giving—how shall I say—when I give to an audience and get back. It’s a good moment. My faith is restored. I feel that these poems, which are occasionally difficult, in which I don’t want to compromise in any manner, still reach people. The rest of the time it’s rather tiring, trying to stay lucid, make all the readings, preserve your energy, not catch colds. The ideal way to travel on a circuit would be with a beautiful nurse who would give you shots and vitamin pills.

BL: How do you select the work you will read on the tour?

CS: I have a base, a sort of skeleton. If I expected the audience to be less sophisticated, for example a high school audience, I will select very descriptive, lyrical poems, and if I have the illusion that the audience is going to be very interested and responsive, I will read very difficult poems or recent poems I’m still working on. It happens also that I underestimate the audience and change my program in the middle of the reading. I can sense in five minutes if the audience is responding. There’s a kind of vibration.

BL: What sustained you over the last ten days of readings?

CS: What kept me going was the beautiful landscape. Each day, it wasn’t so much that I looked forward to reading but to seeing new country. These mountains will stay with me a long time—I’ll draw material out of that.

Mostly, people have a morning routine. What they do first, second. The rest of the day may be determined more by how they make a living. In any case, people have loads of habits. In a way, a “self” might be made up from habits.

I wake up at 9:30, 10, or 10:30—I sleep late and sleep longer and longer (unless I have to teach or have an appointment). Sleeping longer might be my unconscious opposition to the theory that, as you get older, you sleep less. But I do many things in opposition, writing, especially.

I pour water into an electric kettle to boil, then brew a big pot of Irish tea, usually, in an old English teapot given me by writer Harry Mathews, who died a few years ago; it was once his mother’s.I knew him for about ten years when we were walking in SoHo, when SoHo had galleries, and there was a lovely teapot in a store window—ceramic, white, its surface like petals. I was gazing at it. He asked, “Do you like it?” I said yes, and unexpectedly he went into the store and bought it for me. I used that teapot while I wrote my second novel Motion Sickness. After I finished the novel, its spout chipped badly. Much later, Harry gave me the one I use now, his mother’s teapot.

I let the tea brew for five minutes. Usually I set a timer, but sometimes I don’t. I don’t know why I don’t, a timer is easier. I may be testing my memory, I test myself a lot. How many things can I do at once? This is not good, especially in the morning, when I’m not fully awake, and might start doing something and start something else, and not finish either.

I like my tea very strong, flooded with two percent lactose-free milk. To other tea drinkers, the more orthodox, this might be oxymoronic.

When I lived in London, after college, I began drinking tea. Among the English, if I visited someone or returned home, immediately, an English friend or roommate would say, Have a cup of tea? If you were feeling miserable or depressed, as I often was, and sometimes am, the person would add, “Have a cup of tea. It’ll make you feel better.” After a while, it did. A cup of tea made me feel better. Tea is the English placebo.

I used to hate tea. The way I first drank it, as a child, I would be with my family in a nice Chinese restaurant, given a cup of tea in a small white handle-less cup. It was too hot to hold or drink, and too bitter. So were the family fights.

In high school, I drank coffee the way my friends and other Americans usually did. Apparently, and unknown to me, when I sat across from my friends and talked with them, if I was the one talking, I would keep my eyes on them, and wouldn’t look down at the cup. One time, in the diner (I was a suburban girl) the waitress broughtus all coffee. I was saying something, turning my coffee cup around and around to find the handle. But there was no handle. Finally I looked down. My friends roared with happy laughter. They weren’t mean, then.

My breasts turned tender in my late twenties. My breasts were cystic, or had “fluid-filled masses,” which were not cancerous, and nothing to worry about but painful. Coffee made the condition worse. I stopped drinking it, and, like a miracle, my breasts stopped causing me pain, and gave me more pleasure.

Dr. Kulka was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1896. I met him when he was in his eighties. He wore tiny, wire-rimmed glasses, was shorter even than I am—I’m 5 foot 1 ½ inches—and a little stooped over. He was soft-spoken, and I have never had a gentler gynecological exam.

Dr. Kulka warmed the speculum, for one thing, and his breast exams—a thing of beauty. He would bend toward my body and close his eyes tight and keep them closed as if he were dreaming. He leaned in toward my chest, lowered his head, and examined my breasts with the lightest of touches, like a butterfly might. Under his fingers, my breasts transformed into extraordinary flesh. Until he was sure of his findings, Dr. Kulka’s eyes stayed closed.

He learned to detect tumors and abnormalities under many sheets of tissue paper. He was very against the way doctors are taught now: they relied on machines. Women shouldn’t be subjected to needless radiation, often yearly, and wouldn’t be, if doctors were given his training and could feel breasts properly.

When abortions were illegal, Dr. Kulka performed them. He never told me where. It was horrible before Roe v. Wade, you and your doctor were criminals because you didn’t want a child. Dr. Kulka fought for women’s reproductive and other rights. He opened a family planning clinic in Harlem. And, oh yes, he loved delivering babies.

Dr. Kulka stopped practicing in 1991 when he was 91. He died in 1993.

I miss him, I like remembering him, visiting his office, and have many thoughts while lying in bed, half-asleep, before I get myself up, and when drinking my first cup of tea in a large cup. I drift on thoughts.

I’m particular about my tea cup. Sometimes I switch cups until I find the right one. I prefer a large cup, usually older-fashioned, but have drunk from many kinds of teapots and cups, and usually return to something with a history. Once it was a cup given to me by artist Kiki Smith, a beautiful, old cup she found in Germany. I don’t know what happened to it. I think it broke. I must have broken it, somehow it was dropped. I was favorite cup-less for a while, out of sorts or not myself, because a habit was broken too.

What I eat for breakfast and when I eat has changed. I like to change my habits, though they’re hard to change. For a while, I ate soon after I awoke. I used to eat muesli. I used to eat eggs. Now, I have my tea, and don’t eat anything for an hour or two. I’m not sure why. It might be because the morning is a simpler, quieter time, and I want the morning to go on and on.

Now I eat a slice of whole wheat toast, I like it dark with jam.

After breakfast, I might begin to write. Or not. But I turn my phone off. I look at what I wrote the day before or a week ago, and drink my last cup of tea. Or, I do email, which is dangerous, because it leads me faraway from what I believe I should do, write. I procrastinate or avoid, and emails and texts make me nervous, anxious, because there are many messages to answer or put off until later, when you might forget.

I am not a writer with a lot of discipline or regular writing habits. Somehow I get my writing done, because once I start a story, I want to see what happens, I’m curious, keep it going, to see where it goes, and, also, I finish what I start.

For instance, my novel American Genius, A Comedy. (It’s in a new edition, with an introduction by Lucy Ives.) It was written in bunches, over six years.

A woman’s voice came to me in a few sentences I wrote to a friend, writer Lydia Davis, she liked the voice, and then I became interested in that voice. First, I had an idea about how Americans are becoming so sensitive, then her voice came along, joined to that idea about sensitivity, and skin. Her skin, her dry skin. Then, what she thinks about, in a mysterious place, an unnamed institution, where many strange people live also, and there I went. And, finally it was finished. It’s always funny, odd, crazy writing the last sentence. That never changes.

McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. He co-founded successful funds in venture, crossover and private equity. His most recent fund, Elevation, included U2’s Bono as a co-founder. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Roger plays bass and guitar in the bands Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System and is the author of The New Normal and The Moonalice Legend: Posters and Words, Volumes 1-9. He has served as a technical advisor for seasons two through five of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series and was also responsible for raising the money that created the Wikimedia Foundation.

In today’s monologue, Brad talks about Disorder Salon, a new reading series starting up in New Orleans.

Roger McNamee: The way to think about is, I started investing in the technology industry in 1982, which is the very tail end of the Apollo era of Silicon Valley when the space shuttle and the government were the primary focus. The personal computer era was just beginning, so I was there for the beginning of the PC business. I’m the same age as people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, so getting to know people like that was a completely organic thing because they weren’t yet as famous as they eventually would be—and god knows they weren’t as rich. I grew up with the industry. I’m there for the PC industry. I’m there when enterprise products for businesses really takes off and when the Internet begins. I started in mutual funds, which was a place where in the eighties you could be involved with tech in a very academic way. It wasn’t a job you went into to get rich; it was a job you did because you were interested in it.

Brad Listi: You were a nerd.

RM: I was a nerd. My brother had given me a Speak & Spell in 1978, and he said to me that because they can make this thing talk with a couple AA batteries and have a screen and all, this means you’re going to be able to hold all your personal information in your hands in just a few years.

BL: This was your older brother.

RM: Yes, my older brother. That idea just grabbed me, and weirdly it was seventeen years before the Palm Pilot. It was the year after the Apple Two and still three years before the IBM PC. That idea he had—which literally went right out of his head and I don’t think he ever thought about it again—I couldn’t let it go. I was terrible at math, so I couldn’t figure out how to make a prototype of this idea. It was too early, and I was not clever enough to figure out how to do it, so I go into the research world in a very academic setting because I wanted to be there when it happened. I grew up with the industry, and I got to be there. I was involved with Palm. In many ways, it was a perfect situation.

Then, in 2006, I get an email from somebody at Facebook who says, “My boss has a crisis, and he needs to talk to someone who is both experienced and objective and who can keep a secret. Would you meet with him?” I said, sure. I’m pretty free next week, and they said, “No, one o’clock today.” Mark Zuckerberg, age twenty-two, comes to my office. I’m fifty. The company is two years old. He comes, and it was straight out of central casting: the hoodie, the flip-flops, the carrier bag.

Imagine this scene. I had started a firm with Bono from U2 called Elevation, and one of the partners had been the president of Electronic Arts, the video game company, so we had one conference room that was not set up like a conference room but set up like a living room with what was then a giant flat-panel TV with huge speakers and this arcade video game that had been se up with a computer inside of it that had every arcade game ever made in the history of the universe. It had like five thousand different game in every variant. The room is totally soundproof, so it’s weird if nobody says anything because it’s really dead.

Mark sits down maybe three feet away from me, closer to me than I am to you. We’re in comfy chairs. I say, “Mark, we don’t know each other so I have to say something to you because once you start talking you’ll assume anything I say after that is affected by what you told me. I need to give you some context because otherwise we won’t have a free exchange of ideas.” He says go ahead. So I go, “If it already hasn’t happened, either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to offer one billion dollars for Facebook.”

Now keep in mind that the company is two years old and they had nine million dollars in sales, which seems like a big number in a normal sense but realistically in tech terms it’s nothing. “They’re going to offer you a billion dollars, and everyone you know—your parents, your board of directors, your management team, your employees—are going to tell you to take the money, Mark. You’re going to have six hundred and fifty million bucks. You’re going to be able to change the world with six hundred and fifty million bucks.” And I said, “I thought about this a lot and I think you have something really special. I think you solved the core problem with big networks because you require authenticated identity.”

BL: What does that mean?

RM: You could only get on Facebook then if you had an email address from a university or a high school.

BL: And that was the differentiator between Facebook and MySpace?

RM: And everything that came before. Everything before it permitted anonymity because in the early day of the Internet one of the things we got wrong was that we thought idealistically that people would behave well. Giving them anonymity gave them a benefit they wouldn’t abuse, and it turned out just the opposite happened. Anonymity meant that trolls would overwhelm any network overnight. By requiring authenticated identity, Mark had something totally different. I was convinced—and I told him this—that he would be bigger than what Google was at that time.

So I said, “Look, any company that buys you—whether Microsoft or Yahoo—will kill Facebook. It’s never going to achieve its potential, and if you really believe in your vision and if you really believe in this idea that you created, you need to see it through because there have been a lot of great entrepreneurs who’ve had two brilliant ideas. There has never been anybody who has had two brilliant ideas at exactly the right moment, and this is the right moment for Facebook. So whatever they tell you, you’re never going to be able to do this again.”

What happened after that was the most surreal five minutes of my entire life. Imagine you’re in the sound-deadened room, and I’ve just laid this really heavy thing on him. I’m expecting some kind of feedback. What I get instead is dead silence and pantomime thinker poses. It’s chin on hand, then hand on forehead, then looking up and looking up in the other direction.

BL: For how long?

RM: At the one-minute mark, I’m thinking this is weird. At two minutes, I’m started to get really uncomfortable. At three minutes, my fingernails are digging into the cushion of this comfy chair I’m in. At four minutes, I’m literally ready to scream. Somewhere between four and five minutes, he finally relaxes.

There are two things going on. One, in the back of my head I’m thinking, I’ve never been in the presence of anybody who has thought so hard about something I said. In some ways, that was a real compliment. In other ways, this is really weird, right? Extremely socially awkward. But, I’m a nerd myself and I have learned to recognize character traits in successful entrepreneurs and focus is a really important one when you’re trying to build a tech company, and this guy clearly had off-the-rails focus. So he relaxes and goes, “You’re not going to believe this but what you just described is why I’m here. That exact thing just happened. How did you know?”

BL: So he was taking five minutes to decide whether to trust you?

RM: Right, to trust me. The fact that I literally nailed the exact thing, including the dialogue with a venture capitalist funding his next company and all that, so he might as well trust me because I’ve already figured it out. But I hadn’t. I didn’t know anything. All I did was, I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years and I know these people and I know this industry and I know how they behave. This is what happens with companies in your situation. I got lucky on the billion dollars. He didn’t know what to do. “I don’t want to sell the company. I really want to follow the vision, but I don’t want to disappoint everybody.”

I said, “Well, if you really believe in the vision, you’re capable of delivering it. If you do, they’re going to thank you for not taking this deal.” The whole meeting lasted maybe half an hour. He had a way to stop it, and I showed him how to do it without pissing everybody off.

BL: What was that way?

RM: You sit everybody down and you tell that they signed up for this vision, and we’re proving the vision. You can see it; people are signing up like crazy. Keep in mind, they hadn’t even done Newsfeed yet. The thing was so early. It was like a proto-Facebook, but he hadn’t made any mistakes. He went a really long way before he made mistakes that he would have to undo. Normally at a startup, you get all sorts of things wrong in the early days, and you’re constantly backfilling. The original idea—which was secure and authenticated and you controlled your privacy and you controlled who you shared stuff with—that was genius. In my head, I’m thinking he’s going to make the biggest thing ever, he’s going to get one hundred million people. He’s going to have this incredible success story. I mean, the notion of two billion people would never had occurred to me. I told him later, the problem once you get into the billions is that in order to get there you’re going to have to do things or operate in places that should make you uncomfortable . . . When he told me he wanted to go for billions, that’s the message I gave him. Look, there’s something as too big.

In this episode of the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, novelist Marcus Burke and sportswriter Shira Springer discuss writing and basketball with hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell. As March Madness arrives in full force, we talk buzzy topics in the sports world: apprenticeship in college basketball, the need for consistent coverage of women athletes, and the importance of women sportswriters.

To hear the full episode, subscribe to the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (make sure to include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below.

VVG: So a lot of the basketball that Andre plays takes place off-screen in the novel, and what we see is mostly his life in the neighborhood like that scene. But I’m really interested in the figure of Mr. Fulton, who seems like he’s similar in some ways to the kind of AAU coaches we hear about on the news, and usually we hear about that in the context of those coaches who—maybe with the help of an Adidas sales rep—are doing something that the NCAA would disapprove of. And here Andre sees Fulton as a straight arrow, a law and order guy, and I’m wondering if you had a coach like that.

MB: Oh God, yes I had many coaches like that. I had many coaches like that. Well, I’d say the biggest one that I had—I don’t know, it’s questionable about his character, if he’s a decent individual in life, but he told me straight one time, he was my—I won’t name him—he told me straight, this was a coach that I had that was running an AAU program, he was probably making over 100K a year doing it, and—

WT: Oh man, that’s a good deal. I would take that!

MB: I mean, he’s probably made himself a millionaire by now. And he said to me one time that he was the biggest con artist in the city of Boston. And I was like, “oh my gosh.” And this was in reference to me telling him that I was mistreated in an ambulance after I had gotten injured, and he yelled at me and said, “Why didn’t you call me?” and I was like, “Because I called my mom,” and he was like, “I’m the biggest con artist in the city of Boston. You always call me.”

VVG: Oh my God.

WT: Wait, so you were in an ambulance because you got hurt playing ball or got hurt doing something else?

MB: No, I got hurt playing ball, and that chapter is in the new book. I got injured playing basketball, and I encountered some really—I mean, I’m pretty sure they were racist EMTs, and they really didn’t want me in their ambulance, and so, it was the middle of the winter, ’cause you know, basketball, it was probably around this time of year, it was late February, and I’d been injured, I had a high tertiary sprain in my ankle, and I couldn’t walk. They were taking me out of the gym on the gurney in my uniform, so I’m hot, I’m sweaty, it’s the middle of winter and I’m like, “Excuse me, I need a blanket, my coat, it’s cold outside,” and I was on the phone with my mother because they didn’t let me get my things, and so I called my mother, and I said, “Mom, they won’t let me get my stuff.” And so the lady was like, “Uh-uh, give me that phone.” She took the phone from me, and I don’t know what took place between her and my mother, but all I know is she just said, “This is an ambulance, we’re not a home-keeping service,” and hung up on my mother.

WT: Oh my God!

MB: So when that happened I said, “Y’all can just let me out of this ambulance—this is not going well.” And that’s when, the second I said that, she said, “code red” into her little microphone, and then they stopped the ambulance, they opened the doors, and we sat there and waited for the police to come.

WT: Wow.

VVG: Oh my gosh. Marcus, how old were you?

MB: I was probably sixteen. It was amazing because I don’t know, I feel like you start to learn about racism in the world. It was interesting because I was at a really fancy private school. So if it had been a year before when I was in public school, I don’t know what would have happened to me. But the reason that things worked out was because one of my affluent teammates’ mothers, who was a lawyer, was following the ambulance, and she got that lady fired, I believe.

VVG: My God, Boston.

MB: Oh, Boston.

WT: Well, while we’re here, we wanted to ask you what you were working on. Did you say you were writing about this? Those are the rumors we’re hearing—that there’s gonna be a follow-up to Team Seven. There was a chapter from the new novel in McSweeney’s last spring, right?

MB: Yes, I published a chapter from the novel in McSweeney’s last spring, and I am working on a follow-up. I’m actually working on—I guess I’ll just say this—it’s a trilogy of books, where the concern is kind of varied. It’s funny because people say that Team Seven is a basketball book, and Sugi had mentioned most of the basketball happens “off-camera,” and that’s just because I feel like in the first book, the phases of basketball that he was in were not as interesting as the ones he goes into. And so, in the first book you don’t really see that much basketball, but in the next one you’ll see a lot of basketball. He spends a lot more time at the gym and you get more of the AAU stuff just because that’s another world. I think if people aren’t familiar with it, they’ll be blown away. I played for a AAU team in high school and we were traveling around the country, and I don’t know who was paying for all that stuff.

[. . .]

WT: I think we might all know each other because of the fact that we studied with Jim McPherson—James McPherson—at Iowa, and he comes up on the show a lot, and I was thinking about if I had even talked to him about sports, and I don’t think I ever did. But he does have this essay in his essay collection, A Region Not Home called “Grant Hall” that’s kind of an anti-athletics essay. Are you guys familiar with that piece?

VVG: Yeah.

MB: I am familiar with that piece. It’s funny, I did study with Jim as well, and I don’t recall ever really talking about sports with him because I was only a year removed from being a college athlete myself, and so it was something that I didn’t really want to talk about because I think I was still working that out of my system, trying to become a little more human.

WT: He talks about the ways that athletes that he runs into, at Grant Hall in particular, they’re like Spartans, in that way that they’re also like hedgehogs: they know one thing that they know how to do really well, and he talks about wanting to become an Athenian who can skip around and improvise and doesn’t have to be aligned with one particular group. For me, the team concept of being part of the team is so intense when you’re playing athletics, but also it is limiting. My teammates did not like it that I read and took creative writing classes and gave me shit about it all the time. Was that true for you?

MB: They gave me shit about it sometimes, but honestly it was more tongue-in-cheek, because I think they all really thought I was pulling their leg. Because they all had a joke like, “Oh, yeah, you’re writing a book! Put me in your book, man!” and I’d be like, “You don’t really mean that because I’d have to look at your life, and I’m your teammate, I know your life. You don’t want that.”

I remember one time we were on a road trip and a book came out that I wanted, and this was back when Borders was still around. We were at a pre-game meal, and I asked my coach if I could go to Borders and buy a book and he looked at me like I was sick, and he was like, “If you wanna call your girlfriend, just say so,” and I was like, “No, really, I just wanna go buy a book,” and when I came back with it everyone looked at me like I was a Martian. They were like, “Wow, you’re really gonna read this book with all these words.” And I was like, I am.

So no, I think they were more confused by it a little bit, but they were pretty supportive. I was sent to Susquehanna by the coaching staff, or at least somebody on the coaching staff at a Division I program—they’re not there anymore. And when I decided that I wanted to write, he was really angry—the coach that I told you was making all the money—he was really mad. Because we weren’t happy at Susquehanna at all, and he wanted us to leave. And he wanted me to come to Carnegie Mellon. And at the time they didn’t really have a creative writing program I don’t think, or at least not that I could find. And he wanted me to either go to Carnegie Mellon or to Robert Morris. And Robert Morris—Mike Rice was coaching there. And Mike Rice had been abusing players and I had already worked out with him before and I was like, “There’s no way in this world I’m gonna get mixed up with that crowd.”

And then he freaked out on me in such a real way. He said to me that he’d pulled up the statistics of people that make money graduating from college and people that do writing are at the very bottom, and he told me that I was going to be suicidal and alcoholic.

WT: Well, I mean those things are true, but what an asshole for bringing it up! For crying out loud . . .

MB: And so every time I get writing news, I think he always gets a little nervous.

*

PART II

Shira Springer

WT: Earlier this year, you published a couple of articles about coverage of women’s sports and highlighted basketball in particular through a conversation with Sue Bird of the Seattle Storm. You picked out Sugi’s favorite WNBA team, the Minnesota Lynx—which have the coolest name of any professional sports team, in my personal opinion—and the Minneapolis Star Tribune as an example of women’s teams getting good coverage. What are they doing right?

SS: I think it starts with consistency. You know when the Star Tribune is going to cover the Lynx, you can expect it there on a regular basis, so I think it all starts with consistency. They have committed to coverage—they are doing games, they are doing features, they are doing analysis, they send columnists to games. All of that is important, and also, they give it a prominence in the newspaper. You’ll see it on the first page of the sports section, you’ll see it in the Star Tribune’s magazine. And they do big profiles. And I think another factor is they also treat it like they would treat any of the men’s professional teams. And that sometimes means being critical, so some of their analysis, some of the reporters’ analysis of the team is critical. It’s critical of the players, it’s critical of the coaches—so all of that combined makes good coverage.

WT: I love the piece that you wrote for Nieman Reports about this—ways to improve coverage of women’s sports. Sports coverage to me, in the way that it relates to writing and literature, what’s most important about it is narrative, and it’s generational narrative, right? So when you talk about that consistency of coverage, it’s that the narrative has to be consistent, you have to know why it matters how the Lynx are doing this year as opposed to two years ago, and how this player has overcome this problem that they had four years ago. That’s the kind of thing that I follow in sports, in men’s sports. Is that what you’re talking about—that kind of consistency of coverage?

SS: Yeah, you bring up a really good point, and what’s interesting about women’s sports and sort of problematic is that it hasn’t been around for that long, and you don’t have that institutional memory. So you don’t have this great history and this great wealth of narrative to draw from, and it’s so important that the writing we do now about women’s sports establishes that narrative. Because there are great stories out there to tell. And that was really Sue Bird’s point, which was like, “Tell our stories, dig into them, make female athletes three-dimensional,” which is something that doesn’t always happen. So I think you’re absolutely right. There needs to be attention to the narrative of female athletes and also to the narrative of their teams. You know, you’re lucky there with the Lynx in that they have a storied history. I mean, I think they’ve won the most WNBA championships in league history. So they’ve been incredibly successful, and there’s a wealth of stuff, a wealth of stories you can choose from, and I think the Star Tribune makes good use of that and makes good use of that history. But not every city is lucky enough to have a team like that, not every athlete is lucky enough to play on a team like that. So it is, I feel, the responsibility of news outlets to really start telling these stories and telling them on a regular basis.

VVG: So have you seen coverage of women’s sports over the period of time that you’ve been a journalist—how have you seen it change?

SS: Not enough. I wish it had changed more. In the story I point out how coverage of women’s sports only accounts for 4 percent of total sports coverage in the U.S. That’s a really paltry number given how many women are engaged in playing sports at all levels. But I think what’s interesting is since I’ve started covering sports you’ve had the addition of espnW, which is this platform that’s totally dedicated to women’s sports, which is nice. But I’ve personally been impressed with some of the smaller enterprises that are out there and doing coverage, whether they’re feminist podcasts like the Burn It All Down podcast—

WT: Yeah, that was fun to read about. I didn’t know about that podcast.

SS: Exactly, and it’s a great listen, and it’s really fun to hear what they have to say and hear a group of women talking sports—not necessarily women’s sports—but just talking sports and viewing it through a feminist lens, which is always really fun. There’s also a website called Equalizer Soccer. It’s dedicated entirely to women’s soccer, and I know exactly where I will be going for the in-depth Women’s World Cup coverage that I want. I will be going there. And there’s other entities that I mention in the article, like Her Hoops Stats, and I actually just met with the founder of Her Hoops Stats at a sports analytics conference, and he’s doing vital work.

VVG: As a kid, I was a tennis player in addition to a basketball-watcher and also a tennis-watcher, and I remember all of these things about women’s bodies and women’s clothes. When a woman’s body because the object of viewing, how does that affect the writing? And who’s doing the writing?

SS: Well, first of all, not enough women. And somewhere around 10 percent of editors are women. And that’s where the real problem exists because if you have men doing the primary decision-making about how sports get covered and who gets covered, then it often means that women’s sports don’t get covered as much as they should. It also impacts—you talk about image—it also impacts photo selection, the photos that go with the articles. But as far as how the type or the gender of the writer affects the coverage, I think it’s a question of—I look at a female athlete when she’s competing much different than a male colleague does. I may have some male colleagues that object to that, but I’m sorry, it’s true. I would bet that I am much more focused on how she’s competing, her athleticism, her skill level, her talent level, and not so much focused on how she looks or what she’s wearing. I mean, I just cringe now and I still can’t believe it’s done, when I read a lede about a critical match—whether it’s a tennis match or even a critical basketball game, or a track race, or a marathon—and somewhere in the lede there’s a sentence, or even a half a sentence, that focuses on how a female runner looks and connects her look to her accomplishments.

VVG: I was asking that question thinking specifically about Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which includes material on Serena Williams. And what a pleasure and a revelation it was to look at Serena Williams through Claudia Rankine’s eyes. As a kid I read a lot of sports and I was always looking really specifically for feminist sports fiction and still have some of those books that I read when I was a kid— you know, the girl who joins the boy’s baseball team—and I remember there was a series for kids—

WT: Does “The Bad News Bears” then count?

VVG: (laughter) No! Definitely not.

WT: Probably not.

SS: But they had a really good female pitcher. Wasn’t she their savior?

WT: Yeah, that was the whole idea!

VVG: I think I was the kind of kid who was perhaps not allowed to watch “The Bad News Bears.”

WT: Oh, okay. Well we watched it over at our house last night, and my kids learned a lot of new words. It was very fun.

VVG: That’s why I wasn’t allowed (laughter). But there was a sportswriter, John Tunis, who wrote a series of books in which each book focused on a different sport. And then the tennis book focused on women, and—I’m gonna go ahead and spoil the end of the book here—at the end of the book, the woman tennis player gives up in the final of I think Wimbledon, because she wants to get married. And I’ve never felt so much like just hurling a book across the room, which I would never do, but also was just so ticked off about it.

SS: Do you mind if I just wander a little bit from my earphones because you were talking about fiction, and my mom was cleaning out her attic, and she found a book she bought me, and it was about a woman running the Boston Marathon. And I can see it on my bookshelf. I’m just gonna grab it, okay?

WT: Yeah, do.Go ahead.

SS: Okay, I’ve got it. And it is a love story, I think. I’m just gonna describe it. She said she must have found it in some old discarded bin because it’s quite old. The title is The Girl Who Wanted to Run the Boston Marathon. Because at the time I was young, but I had always had a fascination with running the Boston Marathon. This is a novel by Robert McKay. And this is the description on the back cover. You ready?

WT: I’m ready.

SS: “Chris was literally knocked off her feet the first time she met Skip. She’d been running laps around the reservoir, preparing herself for the Boston Marathon, when they collided. At first, she thought he was quite ordinary. Then she realized he was special. Not only good-looking, but ironically, a world-class runner. Fate united these star-crossed lovers and then conspired to separate them before they had even begun to enjoy their love.”

VVG: Dear God.

SS: So it’s supposed to be a story about a woman who wants to run the Boston Marathon, and I have to admit, I may have read it a long time ago, I don’t really remember—it’s a hundred and ninety-page paperback, I should probably read it— but it certainly seems like this book that you would think from the title is like, “Oh, all right, female athletes! Go!” is really about this woman falling in love.

VVG: I loved reading these books by R.R. Knudson where this girl named Suzanne—nicknamed Zan—plays a different sport in every book. And she runs the 1984 L.A. Marathon in one of those books, and she wins. And she never falls in love anywhere in any of the books. I loved these books so much. This girl was such a good all-around athlete that in every book she would play a different sport. And there was one in which she played basketball. And it was probably the first novel I read in which a woman played basketball. And I tore through that whole series really, really fast. I loved it. I remember the ending moments of that marathon book—she makes friends with a Chinese runner and they run together at the end of the marathon. And I must have read that book in 1988, so it really made an impact on me.

SS: Wow, yeah. And you know you’d hope there would be more books like that and fewer like The Girl Who Wanted to Run the Boston Marathon.

VVG: Right, or the girl who gives up in the Wimbledon final to go get married. He can’t just wait until after the final? I mean, what?

This transcript has been edited and condensed by FnF. Transcription by Amanda Minoff.

]]>https://lithub.com/fiction-non-fiction-march-madness-edition/feed/0109710The Quest to Acquire the Oldest, Most Expensive Book on the Planethttps://lithub.com/the-quest-to-acquire-the-oldest-most-expensive-book-on-the-planet/
https://lithub.com/the-quest-to-acquire-the-oldest-most-expensive-book-on-the-planet/#respondThu, 21 Mar 2019 08:49:06 +0000https://lithub.com/?p=109398

A wooden box containing one of the most valuable books in the world arrives in Los Angeles on October 14, 1950, with little more fanfare—or security—than a Sears catalog. Code-named “the commode,” it was flown from London via regular parcel post, and while it is being delivered locally by Tice and Lynch, a high-end customs broker and shipping company, its agents have no idea what they are carrying and take no special precautions.

The widow of one of the wealthiest men in America, Estelle Betzold Doheny is among a handful of women who collect rare books, and she has amassed one of the most spectacular libraries in the West. Acquisition of the Gutenberg Bible, universally acknowledged as the most important of all printed books, will push her into the ranks of the greatest book collectors of the era. Its arrival is the culmination of a 40-year hunt, and she treasures the moment as much as the treasure.

Estelle’s pursuit of a Gutenberg began in 1911, when she was a wasp-waisted, dark-haired beauty, half of a firebrand couple reshaping the American West with a fortune built from oil. Now 75, she is a soft, matronly figure with waves of gray hair. The auspicious occasion brings a flash of youth to her face, and she is all smiles. But she resists the impulse to rip into the box, leaving it untouched overnight so she can open it with appropriate ceremony the next day.

Estelle has invited one of her confidants, Robert Oliver Schad, the curator of rare books at the Henry E. Huntington Library, to see her purchase, and at noon he arrives with his wife, Frances, and their 18-year-old son, Jasper. Estelle’s secretary, Lucille Miller, escorts the family through the mansion’s Great Hall to the library, and with a sweep of her hand invites the group to sit at the oblong wood table in the center. The Book Room, as Estelle affectionately calls it, is finished in rich redwood and had been her husband’s billiard parlor. Its walls had once featured paintings related to Edward Doheny’s petroleum empire, murals commissioned by the onetime prospector who drilled some of the biggest gushers in the history of oil. Today the room is lined with custom-built shelves for Estelle’s beloved books—her own personal empire, worth as much as Edward’s oil.

Her collection began almost as a lark, sparked by popular lists of books that everyone should own, but now contains nearly 10,000 exceedingly rare volumes available only to the fabulously wealthy and culturally ambitious—gilded illuminated manuscripts glowing with saints and mythical creatures; medieval encyclopedias; and the earliest examples of Western printing, 135 incunabula—books printed before the year 1501. Such seminal works of Western culture as Cicero’s De officiis and Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica rub shoulders with a sumptuous 1477 copy of The Canterbury Tales. This is the million-dollar company the Gutenberg Bible will keep on its shelf.

The two-by-three-foot crate waits at the center of the table, spotlighted by a bronze-and-glass billiard lamp. When Estelle enters the room, accompanied by her companion and nurse, Rose Kelly, the group stands silent. Lucille takes out a pair of scissors and passes it around. Estelle, dressed for the occasion in a pale blue printed silk dress, a gem-studded comb at her right temple, wants everyone to take part, so each person makes a cut in the knotted cord that winds the package.

It’s an emotional occasion for Lucille, too, a slim, long-limbed woman with center-parted, brown hair that curls up around her cheeks. Never without a pencil tucked behind her ear, she has a subdued beauty that’s easy to miss, a pale, symmetrical face hidden behind her glasses. Lucille has been Estelle’s steady partner in the quest for the Gutenberg, party to every promise, hope, and near miss for nearly 20 years. She almost allows herself to smile as she pulls away the box’s coverings and lifts the lid, but then she sees the shabby mess inside. “I could hardly believe my eyes,” she said later. “It just looked like a bundle of old tattered, torn papers. It was the most carelessly wrapped thing I ever saw.” The precious book has been enclosed without padding, wrapped in thin cardboard and then in dark corrugated paper tied with a heavy cord. Lucille mentally chastises the customs officials in New York who had opened the parcel for inspection and then shoved it back in the box “any old way, and tied a string or two here or there and along it came.”

The price of the book when it left the printer’s workshop was believed to be about thirty florins, equivalent to a clerk’s wages for three years.

But as she lifts it out of the last of the wrappings, the Bible appears to be fine. For an expert like Robert Schad, there is no mistaking the original 15th-century binding of age-darkened brown calfskin stretched over heavy wood boards. The copy now in Estelle Doheny’s possession is the first issue of the first edition of the first book printed with movable metal type, in near-pristine condition, its pages fresh and clean. The lozenge and floweret patterns stamped into the leather cover are still sharp and firm to the touch. Five raised metal bosses protect the covers, one ornament in the center and one set in an inch from each of the four corners. Two broken leather-edge clasps are the only reminders that this book, which has presented the Living Word for nearly five centuries, has been opened and closed often enough to wear down the heavy straps.

Lucille moves close to her employer, standing on her left and tucking her arm under the spine of the heavy book so that Mrs. Doheny can more easily examine it. Estelle reaches out to touch the fine old leather and slowly lifts the cover and opens the enormous volume. With her gold-framed glasses perched on the edge of her nose, she glides her right hand softly over the edges of the book’s rippling leaves, taking special care not to touch the print. As she turns the crackling pages one by one, she is overcome with quiet joy. Her pursuit of this object of Western invention had begun long ago, during happier days, before her husband was embroiled in scandal. She feels the smoothness of the heavy rag paper under her fingers and strains to focus her gaze on the black Gothic letters, but the Latin text is lost in a cloudy blur and she can’t make out the printed lines. A hemorrhage in one eye and glaucoma in the other have left Estelle almost completely blind at the age of 75.

Still, she knows well what she possesses, and just to be in its presence would be stirring to anyone who understands its significance. The European advancement of printing with movable metal type transformed every aspect of human civilization, and Johann Gutenberg’s execution of the work set a standard that few would match.

As Estelle runs her hands over the book, Schad, a poised man of medium build who’s dressed today in a black suit and tie with a crisp white shirt, points out a few of the qualities that make it unique. Every Gutenberg Bible is somewhat different from every other because while Gutenberg’s workshop printed the pages of each massive volume, the printers left it to the purchaser to have them bound and decorated. Guided by the owner’s taste and budget, a whole team of artisans might step in to customize the book—illuminators would be hired to paint the highly pictorial ornamental letters, and specialists known as rubricators added chapter titles and headings separate from the text.

The first owner of this Bible had not scrimped on ornamentation. The volume is filled with elaborate, richly colored illuminations and enlarged capital letters. In the upper left corner of the first page, a large capital letter F is painted in bright green and gold with ornaments of green leafy vines and tiny, bell-shaped flowers that trace the outer margin. The intricate foliage sweeps down the page and across the bottom, where in the far right corner the artist added a white-bellied blue bird with a bright yellow beak.

Such imagery stands in delicate contrast to the enduring richness of Gutenberg’s type. Jet-black and lustrous, the ink shimmers as if the pages were just recently printed, a quality that was long one of the great mysteries of Gutenberg’s art, a hallmark of the Bibles he printed in Mainz, Germany, before August 15, 1456.

Most scholars believe that Gutenberg produced about 180 copies, and among these, most likely 150 were printed on paper and 30 on animal skin known as vellum. The price of the book when it left the printer’s workshop was believed to be about thirty florins, equivalent to a clerk’s wages for three years. The vellum versions were priced higher, since they were more labor-intensive and expensive to produce—a single copy required the skin of 170 calves.

Estelle’s copy is one of the 45 known to exist in 1950. They’re in various conditions, scattered around the world in private libraries and museums: 12 in America, 11 in Germany, 9 in Great Britain, 4 in France, 2 in Italy, 2 in Spain, and 1 each in Austria, Denmark, Poland, Portugal, and Switzerland. Fewer than half have all their original pages, a pre-condition of being designated “perfect.”

Hers is perhaps the most beautiful of the surviving paper copies. Despite its age, this volume lacks no pages and has no serious damage. Designated as Number 45 in a definitive list compiled by Hungarian book authority Ilona Hubay, this Bible has clearly received special care through the centuries, or at least supremely benign neglect.

Thanks to a strong US dollar and the recent devaluation of the British pound sterling, she has managed to secure one of Western civilization’s great artifacts at a bargain price.

Gutenberg’s printed pages were usually bound in two volumes, and nearly half of the known copies are considered “incomplete” because the second volume has been lost. That is the case with Number 45, which contains the Old Testament from Genesis through the Psalms. But it is one of the few to retain its original binding, created in Mainz contemporaneously with its printing. The calfskin cover is decorated in a distinctive pattern of impressions. A lattice motif of small diamonds, known by bookmen as a “lozenge diaper,” surrounds six different stamps: an eagle, a trefoil, a eur-de-lis, and a seven-pointed star. Those details, and the cover as a whole, are in exceptional condition.

Lucille steps aside so that Schad can gently steady the 15-pound volume for Estelle. Of all the bookmen who have come and gone during her decades of zealous acquisitions, none have meant more to her than Robert O. Schad, a trusted adviser in her quest, who for the past twenty years has hand-selected the items purchased to strengthen the magnificent “collection of collections” at the Huntington Library. Like Estelle, he is completely self-taught, educated through decades of direct contact with the world’s most important books and the famous dealers who trade them. He has always treated her with respect, and always welcomed her questions, no matter how unsophisticated.

Schad signals his son to pick up the Kodak Duaflex twin-lens camera they’ve brought. Jasper rapidly snaps a half-dozen photographs, covering the bulb with a white handkerchief to protect Mrs. Doheny’s sensitive eyes. In one frame, Estelle holds the Bible, gazing down at its pages. As far as Schad knows, this is only the second time a Gutenberg Bible and its owner have been photographed together.

The day has become “boiling hot,” and the party retires to the mansion’s Pompeian Room. Beneath a twenty-four-foot-wide Favrile glass dome ceiling attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany, the group fetes the Gutenberg Bible’s arrival with a luncheon whose menu Lucille saves for the ages: jellied consommé madrilene with crackers and relishes; fried chicken with hominy and hot biscuits; mixed-green salad and a platter of fresh peaches, pears, and persimmons; and a dessert of cream puffs and cookies, with tea served in glasses chilled with an abundance of ice.

According to Lucille’s daybook, the luncheon ends promptly at 2:30 pm, when she returns to the Book Room to put the Bible back in its shipping box, preserving the tattered wrapping. As she tucks it away, she notices a stiff white card that reads simply: “Customs Officer: Please handle with GREAT CARE and repack in same manner. Thank you.” Below the handwritten note is printed, “With the COMPLIMENTS OF MAGGS BROS. LTD.”

“I am keeping the book,” Estelle hurriedly writes Ernest Maggs, one of London’s revered book dealers, early the following morning. She dispatches a check for 25,000 pounds sterling, the equivalent then of $70,093.

It is a check that she is delighted to sign. Thanks to a strong US dollar and the recent devaluation of the British pound sterling, she has managed to secure one of Western civilization’s great artifacts at a bargain price. With payment tendered, Estelle Betzold Doheny becomes the first and only woman to purchase a Gutenberg Bible as a private collector. Her deep need to own this holy book not only reflects her faith as a devout Catholic but also reveals her shrewd mind for the bottom line.

She tells Lucille she has never felt richer or more content. The book is a panacea for the deep personal losses she has faced, and, she believes, it is a gift from God. It not only lifts her heart, it changes her very image of herself.

“The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”

“There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.”

“But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.”

No other wallpaper, fictional or factual, has ever gotten quite so much attention as the titular wall covering in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

Thanks to its ubiquity on high school and college syllabi, “The Yellow Wallpaper” has a readership that’s surely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, strong. These readers might even know that Gilman’s own near-catastrophic experience with the “rest cure” under physician Silas Weir Mitchell inspired her to write the story. But it’s far less common to teach Gilman’s extensive nonfiction writing, and accordingly, most readers only know the story of one story. In her day Gilman was far better known as a lecturer than a fiction writer. She faded from public consciousness after her death. When the 1960s and 1970s saw more attention paid to Gilman’s work, feminists shaped her rediscovered canon, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” “acquired a cult status as an early feminist manifesto.”

Fiction and nonfiction both have the power to inform, to move, to stir. So why does “The Yellow Wallpaper” endure in a way that Gilman’s first-hand accounts on the same subject matter have not?

Is it because the short story itself is so clear, so simple? Narrator gets terrible advice from her physician husband and brother on how to manage her depression; follows it; loses her grip on sanity. It’s an easy text to teach, and students everywhere can quickly grasp how the narrator’s voice shifts from breezy wit to fully unhinged psychosis, from “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer” to “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

Gilman herself was rather more complex. After the postpartum psychosis and resultant institutionalization that inspired “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she separated from her husband—nearly unheard-of in 1888—and supported herself and her daughter as a single mother with her writing. She moved to California and lived with fellow writer Adeline Knapp, almost certainly as lovers. A few years later, she both divorced her husband and sent her daughter to live with him and his new wife. In 1900, she married her first cousin. Thirty-five years later, after a terminal breast cancer diagnosis, she intentionally took a fatal dose of chloroform to end her life.She had long been an advocate for euthanasia, and in this case, practiced what she preached.

Taken together, her choices form a clear picture of a woman ahead of her time. Except that in other ways, she was all too typical of white feminists of her day. She accused non-white immigrants of “diluting” the racial purity of America and advocated for a government-run, slavery-adjacent system of forced labor, which she called “enlistment,” for black Americans.

In her day it was her progressive attitudes that might have made potential readers uncomfortable; today, it’s her regressive ones that give us pause.

I ran across the broader, more complex reality of Gilman and her writing almost by accident. While researching first-hand accounts of women institutionalized in insane asylums and sanatoriums in 19th-century America for my novel Woman 99, I dove deep into Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls, 1840-1945. Gilman’s account is among those collected. Yet the readership for these accounts, powerful as they may be, certainly pales in comparison to that of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Fiction has the power to change minds. Does it also, by filtering facts through the lens of a created narrative, make unpleasant truths more palatable? Books like Ellen Marie Wiseman’s What She Left Behind and The Address by Fiona Davis draw from the harsh realities of how women were treated in 19th-century asylums, but set these stories in a larger fictional context with a clear, closed arc. It’s possible that many readers will pick up a fictional account more readily, that “something bad happened” is easier to handle than “something bad happened to me.”

As a fiction writer, I appreciate and embrace the ways that fiction blends education and entertainment. Historical novelists are time-travelers, magicians, magpies. Both fiction and nonfiction rise and fall on the selection of telling detail; fiction writers have a lot more freedom in where those details come from and how they fit together to form a cohesive, satisfying narrative.

But there is an authenticity to first-hand accounts that resonates with modern readers, and powerful nonfiction accounts are also on the rise. Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy were New York Times bestsellers, reaching readers with first-hand insight on the experience of diagnosis, treatment, and living with mental illness. Just last month, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias joined their ranks, debuting on the NYT list at #3. As we honor the right of too-often silenced voices to be heard, and work to destigmatize mental illness, these accounts make particularly powerful tools for empathy.

So why fiction for Charlotte Perkins Gilman? In a 1913 issue of The Forerunner, she recounted that after going back to work following her institutionalization, she was “naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape,” writing a story about the experience and “sen[ding] a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad.” Though Mitchell did not reply to her directly, she heard through the grapevine that “the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading “’The Yellow Wallpaper.’”

She wrote it to change one man’s mind. She succeeded.

“It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy,” said Gilman, “and it worked.”

Since I write about women and literature in Zagreb, I must retitle A Room of One’s Own as Someone Else’s Property. I don’t stroll through an Oxbridge quad for inspiration, rather I wrest it from the internet in someone else’s kitchen that hasn’t been renovated in the last 60 years. The Zagreb landscape is a world apart when it comes to essayistic vision. Let’s take, for example, Bundek Park. There you can drink in the fumes of someone’s birthday barbecue and admire the busts of Russian poets. Had Virginia Woolf been forced to walk Mayor Bandić’s gravelly paths in search of inspiration, her cult essay would’ve sounded quite different. Admittedly, some things would be the same: “A husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family”—the problem of women’s creativity is universal.

Routinely, the inspiration I’ve found in someone else’s property I’ve then developed further, in other property belonging to someone else—most often at the mall, which lacks both natural light and natural desires. I feel comfortable there, where money is talked about in a candid and practical manner; such an environment helps me distinguish the themes that money carries into literature from the themes that it ejects from literature.

At no point should one forget that literature is a commodity that we can, but don’t have to, sell: a literary work can rot like a heap of Opuzen tangerines that never found their customer. As a property deteriorates when no one invests in it, so do the books of authors who likewise deteriorate in dilapidated properties. Does literature, we must ask, have any autonomy in relation to the old pipes, the leaky roof, the malfunctioning toilet, and the broken radiator? Of course it doesn’t. You can’t create a utopia in a room that’s a coffin. Actually, you can, but then it’s just a question of which drugs to take.

There is no room of one’s own in someone else’s property. We must banish from our heads the idea that it’s possible to make a home where nothing is ours. Which means that the literature written to pay rent to other people for these “rooms of one’s own” isn’t ours, either. It doesn’t belong to us because we don’t have the freedom to buy or sell anything with it. A literary text, just like a journalistic one, isn’t free if it’s tied to survival: none of us is above putting food on the table, paying bills, or keeping a roof over our head. No one. What can ease literature’s burden is the freedom of not needing to pay for someone else’s property with one’s writing. Having fewer expenses reduces the strain on the text. When we need to earn less, the work is less compromised because we don’t have to make concessions; we don’t hold back; we won’t censor ourselves so that others can pay for what they want to hear.

I often dream of my own apartment, really a small shack or cottage on some mountain slope near a forest, with fast internet and walking paths that Milan Bandić hasn’t come anywhere near. I don’t need a lot to give more through my writing, just the freedom to put the armchair where I want, to look no longer upon someone else’s idea of a home while trying to write essays free from the tenant’s expenses. A room of one’s own is liberating because it allows us to adapt the space to our writing.

If I don’t want any musty closets or cabinets around me, or rickety, defective chairs that make my cervical spine hurt even worse—what option do I have when such property, someone else’s farce of a property, is the only thing I can afford in Zagreb? Money dictates our themes and the rooms in which we write—they influence the text. It’s a lie to say we write whatever we want, whenever we want. We write what we have to write to survive. In my case this survival increasingly demands that I write fantasy because the space where I write is overfull of anxious daily banalities that I can’t write about in equally banal fashion without going crazy.

I’m not talking, of course, about escapism. Literature isn’t a bucket of bitumen that we pour on a leaky roof. When one writes in a difficult place, literature should show where the drip is, where the cracks are that need to be fixed: it’s the pile of snow on a crumbling roof and the bitter pill we have to take in order to open our eyes and see that we’re paying too much rent to lie in someone else’s coffin. Literature that peddles lies about everything working out on its own is the paid advertisement by which the writer rents the coffin for even longer, maybe even for life. And not only for themselves, but for their readers as well.

Margot’s favorite book on her mom’s cart is Pearl S. Buck’s The Time Is Noon. It’s green, and she’s not-quite-two years old—so a pretty color is enough of a reason to choose a favorite book.

Her mom, Brittany Bond, prefers anything by Doris Lessing. Today she has The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. But she’s not picky; she loves Margaret Drabble and has started reading Joan Didion too.

“I’ve kind of spent my whole life trying to find jobs that I could just sit and read at,” Bond joked with me while she set up her book cart on a recent February afternoon. After she had Margot, Bond, faced with the prospect of expensive childcare, wanted to find a project that she could tackle with her daughter along for the ride.

Bond began posting photographs of rare used book editions and the marginalia she found within books on Instagram several years ago, hunting for used books by female authors in the $1 shelves outside the Strand and in the used section at the Housing Works Bookstore. Then, she reviewed and photographed the books on Instagram, gradually growing an online community of fellow book-lovers, and began to resell the books to her followers.

Bond named the project Common Books, and this January she took it to the streets of New York’s Lower East Side in the form of a little traveling book cart.

Some of her finds were unexpected, like Louisa May Alcott’s romantic thrillers.

The cart, designed and built by Bond’s brother and sister-in-law, includes a special seat for Margot and space for Bond to store her books. She typically sets up shop near the East River or Seward Park and has plans to wander to new areas as the weather gets warmer. Before taking to the streets, Bond learned that individuals do not need a permit to sell materials protected by the First Amendment in New York (in true literary city fashion).

In the Common Books book cart and Instagram account, Bond highlights used paperback books by female authors; paperback books for their lightweight feel, female authors because they are underrepresented, and used books for their histories.

“I think books should be accessible for everyone. You should be able to slide them in your pocket,” Bond said. On the Common Books Instagram, she writes that paperbacks are ideal for New York readers “on trains and buses, in waiting rooms and laundromats, on elevators and park benches.”

Bond focuses her work on paperbacks by female authors to highlight the diversity of women’s writing. “I have noticed that a lot of people, when they see someone reading a book by a female writer that they don’t recognize, they assume it’s fluff or trash,” Bond said. “I want to have a platform where I can share female writers that aren’t as well known.”

She also stocks a collection by well-known authors like Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and L.M. Montgomery. Some of the books have special significance to Bond personally. “This copy of Anne of Green Gables was the copy I had, like I still have it, and it’s held together with tape,” she says, picking up books on her cart. “The copy I had as a kid, my mom got while she was on bedrest when she was pregnant with me, and she read through the whole series while she was pregnant with me.”

Photo by Cecilia Nowell

Some of her finds were unexpected, like Louisa May Alcott’s romantic thrillers. “I have been discovering since starting the cart that Louisa May Alcott is more than just Little Women,” Bond said, laughing. “The first book I sold, the first day I took the cart out, was a book by her called The Modern Mephistopheles,” a story about a writer who promises his soul to a stranger in exchange for fame and fortune.

Bond has ventured outside a handful of times on sunny days, when she and Margot can keep warm in their layers of hats and coats for an hour or two. She already has repeat customers, but the online community that she found on Instagram remains dear to her. Online, Bond has sold books to readers as far away as London and exchanged thoughts about the notes left behind in used books with fellow book fans across the US.

In December, Bond posted a photograph of Helene Hanff’s Q’s Legacy to Instagram. Q’s Legacy is a memoir of Hanff’s experience writing 84, Charing Cross Road. In it, she describes mail-ordering books from a store at 84, Charing Cross Road in London, and the friendship she formed with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch as he recommended books for her to read.

Bond reviewed Q’s Legacy in her Instagram post, mentioning that its plot reminded her of the friendships she had made over Instagram. “This kind of friendship is as old as the postal service,” she wrote.

After Bond sold the book, one of her followers reached out to say that she had been inspired to order a copy of Q’s Legacy too. When the copy arrived, a handwritten note by Helene Hanff herself fell out. She sent a photograph of the book and note to Bond immediately. They were thrilled that their online friendship had connected them to Hanff’s mail-order story.

Bond’s dedication to connecting used books to new readers feels like its own kind of friendship match-making: between the original readers who scribbled notes on the pages of books and new readers who find those notes and their stories years later.

Those books also connect us to the different people we were when we first encountered them, Bond wrote on Instagram, on her experience re-reading Anne of Green Gables. “I was haunted by my dad’s voice when he first read it to a very small me and by the voices of my past selves from each of the dozen plus times I read it since he introduced it to me.”